October was a very blessed month for me. Besides turning a year older last month, I won second place for Feature Writing during the Regional Schools Press Conference, so I will be going to Tagum City to compete in the Nationals. I was also named Caraga’s Outstanding Campus Journalist for the Secondary level during the same event.

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I finished reading two classic books this week: Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince and Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea.

The Little Prince is a very odd book. I’m sure the author meant to bring a point across, and I guess he succeeded, at least in a way—Asteroid B612′s little prince’s frivolity is a wake-up call to people whose lives are too preoccupied by things too worldly to warrant so much attention. The finicky rose on his home planet and how he painstakingly took care of it could perhaps be interpreted to symbolize love and all that. However, I find it extremely difficult to understand why Saint-Exupéry chose the little prince and his psychedelic adventures to be the vessel of his message. Perhaps I’ve grown too old to appreciate the color and wonder of his work.

That scares me. I don’t want to ever grow old in that sense.

The second book, The Old Man and the Sea, is a fantastic (and much more digestible, at least to me) read. I cheated, though—instead of the book itself, I read Barron’s Book Notes for it. In fairness to myself, I feel I wouldn’t have appreciated the novella as much if I’d read the original work. Hemingway did such a masterful job with the symbolism in the book, regardless of whether you think it was autobiographical. I think that without the Book Notes, I wouldn’t have caught the little nuances that make the book so enduring, such as when Hemingway paints Santiago as a man whose life was the sea—a fact reflected by his eyes which were colored like the ocean—and who appeared dead with his eyes shut.

If you still haven’t read The Old Man and the Sea, though, I recommend you purchase a copy of the work itself together with the Book Notes. I think that is the best way to enjoy the work. Hemingway’s simple but strong language is superbly effective in unfetteredly delivering what he wants delivered but can sometimes belie to the plebeian reader the tenacity and emotion of his work, so the Book Notes can be thought of as a guide to deconstruct the complexity of the masterpiece.

Thank you, by the way, to Sir Jay for loaning me the Book Notes.

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Dan Brown’s latest novel, The Lost Symbol, hasn’t had much luck with critics, or so I’ve heard. I hate to even entertain the thought, but could Robert Langdon’s glory days be over? Maybe the world has simply grown tired of an eternally single, claustrophobic Harvard symbologist’s history-rich capers. Maybe Dan Brown has milked every last creative drop out of Langdon. Maybe there is no more story to be milked.

I haven’t read the book yet, though, so I’ll reserve personal judgment for later. I would have bought a copy the last time I was within comfortable distance of a National Bookstore branch, but the Php900++ price tag on the hardcover version is out of my reach. Considering what the book reviews have been saying, I can wait for it to come out in paperback form.

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Currently, I’m reading Dreams From My Father by Barack Obama. I’ve barely reached page 30 of the book but so far it’s been a captivating and insightful read, made enjoyable by Obama’s simple style.

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National Novel Writing Month 2009 has begun!

I spent a considerable amount of time last night formulating the very general plot of my novel. I think today I’ll hurry up character development and finally give my protagonist and the object of his affection their names. I have a November 30 deadline to meet, and a NaNo participant who wants to complete his novel must write at least 1,667 words a day to meet the 50,000-word requirement. Those who can only work on weekends must be able to come up with 12,500 words every weekend to make the quota! Obviously there is a lot of work to be done, and with school and other highly important things also on my to-do list, this year’s NaNo is promising to be very daunting.

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I very recently upgraded my machine to Linux Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala, the latest version of the popular Linux distribution. It is no exaggeration to say that this OS is gorgeous, inside and out. The pedestrian user may not be able to readily recognize the more drastic changes that have been made—mostly in security and in the Linux kernel itself—but they will definitely improve overall user experience.

I’ve made it a point to do a clean install every time a new version comes out (instead of clicking “Upgrade” in Update Manager). This time around, I found a little difficulty in installing Karmic as my DVD drive had gone bonkers so I couldn’t burn a CD. I decided to download the Karmic ISO then use the USB Startup Disk Creator utility that came with 8.10 Jaunty Jackalope to make Karmic bootable from my flash drive. After fiddling with the BIOS a little, booting from the USB key and setting up Ubuntu, I was good to go. It took me a grand total of less than two hours and $0 to get set up. This is why I love FOSS.

Don’t get me wrong—Ubuntu Linux is an incredible operating system. In fact, I’m writing this blog post on Ubuntu right now. I like its lightness and speed, plus the fact that it’s open source and completely free. However, being a certified Windows user since my early grade school days, it has been very difficult to get used to a completely different working environment, which is why I opted to dual-boot with Vista Ultimate (yes, Vista—it’s not all that bad) instead of wiping out the entirety of my hard drive and installing just Linux.

Looking back, I’m thankful I chose to dual-boot. Why? There are just some programs that work a-okay in Windows but refuse to in Linux. And these aren’t programs of secondary importance, either. These are stuff I use frequently and cannot live without. Sure, there might be Linux-compatible programs to replace these, but nothing beats the quality of the real thing.

iTunes

Yes. I run iTunes. It’s painfully slow, but I need it for my iPod and iPhone. It’s the easiest way to sync my music, video, podcasts, photos, etc. into the music player extraordinaire without wrecking it. I’ve tried Amarok (a popular Linux music player) to do that for me, but I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to restore my iPod because the system kept on shuffling my album art.

I’ve been reading stuff on the Internet and apparently, most people have no problem at all with their iPods and Ubuntu, so I guess my case is pretty unique. It’s also a petty annoyance when you think about it, but it still irritates me a lot and diminishes my music-listening experience. As Linux’s popularity grows, I’m fairly certain Apple will come out with a Linux version of iTunes, hopefully sooner rather than later.

DOES IT WORK WITH WINE: From what I’ve read online, iTunes refuses to run using Wine, which makes it all the more difficult for me to switch. WINE, by the way, is an acronym for “Windows Emulator”. It’s a program that allows you to install for-Windows programs on your Linux machine.

Photoshop

Photoshop is love. I’ve been tinkering with Adobe’s renowned photo editing software ever since I got hold of a digital camera. It allows me to touch up my photos seamlessly, remove zits from my mug shots, and even create my own campaign paraphernalia.

Mock campaign poster for moi, created on Photoshop CS3.

It’s this kind of quality that I find difficult to achieve on Linux’s answer to Photoshop, GIMP. GIMP, which stands for the GNU Image Manipulation Program, comes with a vanilla Ubuntu install, and has been described by many as having features “similar” to that of Photoshop. Personally, I can’t say they’re even remotely alike. GIMP also has more restrictions and is less versatile than Photoshop. I know of people who’ve created works of art using the relatively rudimentary photo manipulation software, but for a newbie like me, Photoshop is still the way to go.

DOES IT WORK WITH WINE: Photoshop CS2 is listed as one of the programs that work swell with Wine on this list on the software’s official website.

MS Office Suite 2007

While OpenOffice might be sufficient enough for most people, I honestly believe it still lacks a lot of the features Microsoft Office has provided throughout the years. I love Microsoft Excel and the many complex functions it can execute in the blink of an eye; Word and its several (not to mention deantastic) formatting options; the fancy animations on PowerPoint; the ease of creating a brochure in Publisher.

OpenOffice.org simply lacks the versatility and functionality I find appealing in MS Office, and while I do believe that the fact that OpenOffice is open-source means that it has a lot of potential, I’ll have to stick with Office until that day comes when it trumps Microsoft’s offering in the office suite market.

DOES IT WORK WITH WINE: See this page; it seems to work fairly well, although some users are reporting a few bugs. This is normal, of course, considering that you’re running a Microsoft product on a Linux install.

Conclusion

Look, don’t get me wrong—I have none but a few qualms about Ubuntu. Over all, it’s a pretty OS, and its *nix-ness is definitely a plus. It’s just that the three programs I’ve mentioned above are critical to my computing environment. They’re stuff I just can’t live (or at least compute) without. Only when they get stable, workable Linux versions will I even consider moving to Linux.

When Gizmodo alerted me to the fact that Intrepid Ibex, the latest version of popular Linux distro Ubuntu, was out for download, the early adopter in me screamed, “upgrade!” So today, I spent the entirety of the day away from the computer and on my iPhone as Ubuntu upgraded to 8.10. Finally, after ten hours of waiting, the process is complete. Hello, Ibex!

This isn’t a huge release for Ubuntu. It’s not a Long-Term Support (LTS) release unlike 8.04, Hardy Heron, so nothing radical has changed. It has enhanced driver support though—my TravelMate’s WiFi button light thing, which didn’t use to blink, does now. There’s also this new utility in System -> Administration -> create a USB startup disk. It does exactly that—create a USB startup disk from which you can boot Linx. I unfortunately don’t have a spare flash drive lying around, but will see to it to try this thing out when I do.

As I said, this isn’t a major release. The next LTS they’ll be putting out is 9.04, codename Jaunty Jackalope. Its due date is relatively far off—April of next year, says Gizmodo—but I’m psyched nonetheless.

There’s nothing much to say about Ibex, except that you should probably download it now. If you already have Hardy Heron on your system, upgrading’s easy (albeit, with speeds like mine, painfully time-consuming).

Ooh, and the National Novel Writing Month starts in about half an hour. Weeee!

Book cover of my NaNoWriMo project.

The National Novel Writing Month begins in just 24 hours, and I’m participating for the first time! I’m going to use a long-forgotten plot from a story in one of my abandoned Mibba accounts, and my novel is tentatively titled “Calhoun Beach”. I even have a book cover already!

NaNoWriMo, as the project is often called, is a monthlong event that encourages you to write that novel you got around to doing. The goal is 50,000 words by the end of November, and you win if you get to—or better yet surpass—that threshold.

I’ve been writing for as long as I can remember, although I only began dabbling in novel/story writing in my freshman high school year after seeing some friends doing it (“it” being writing, of course, you naughty boy/girl you). I can’t tell you how many novels I’d begun to write and scrapped because I was discouraged by my own work.

But the NaNoWriMo’s all about hussle. It doesn’t matter how bad your writing will become, how senseless your plots will turn out to be, or how gooey your brain will be at the end of the month. What will matter is that you write.

If you’re an aspiring novelist who’s never gotten around to writing your masterpiece, NaNoWriMo might just be the spark to ignite your career. Head on over to the NaNoWriMo website and sign up. When you’re done, add me to your buddy list—my user handle over there’s dlozarie.

Oh, and semestral break hasn’t been as productive as I hoped it would be. It’s back to school this Monday, but I plan to write, write, and write (blog posts) over the weekend to catch up. (For now, I’m plurking and looking to upgrade my Ubuntu install—8.10, Intrepid Ibex, is out!) I’ll be the first to admit that I haven’t taken care of my blog as much as I ought to, but what the hey.

I’ve also implemented a new theme on the blog, and it’s something I created myself. Yay me! If you’re reading this in a feed reader, you might want to check it out. Feedback is welcome. If you spot a bug, please, please, please report it through my contact page. Thankies!